A first look at Messalith

Psychic squad tactics in Europe, six million years ago.

Your exiles came from the far future through a Rift that only opens one way. On the other side the Mediterranean is gone, dried down to a white basin of salt and brine, and two peoples from other worlds got here first. You have bows. Slings, a spear or two, a salvaged rifle with a few power cells left in it, and the Neuro-Crowns that wake whatever sleeps in your people's heads.

A Shaper tears a boulder from the ground with ember threads of thought — Hurl: a Shaper tears stone from the earth and throws it

Four disciplines, one price

A crown wakes one discipline. Shapers move stone: rip a boulder out of the ground and throw it hard enough to shatter half cover, or heave up a wall where your squad needs one. Menders close wounds and can drag a downed exile back onto their feet before the two turns of bleeding run out. Seers push their sight across sixteen tiles of rock and shadow and show you who's waiting there. Voices will turn enemy minds, once we've built them.

All of it runs on Will. Hurl costs 20 and you get 10 back a turn. That same Will is what holds a squadmate together when the exile next to them goes down, so a Shaper who spends freely on turn two can be the one who panics on turn four.

Teal threads of light run from a Mender's crown into a wounded squadmate — Mend: pale threads run from the Mender's crown into the wounded

A rose-coloured tide of sight sweeps out from a Seer, revealing hidden enemies — Unveil: a Seer's sight runs out across the land, through rock and shadow

Casting is the big moment

Crowns flare when a power fires. Threads of light bend from the caster to the target, ember for Shapers, teal for Menders, rose for Seers, and the camera leans in for about a second. Space skips it. The other side sings back: Brine Choir Choristers drain Will from eight tiles away, which hits hardest on exactly the psychics you were counting on.

The camp roster: a dossier for each exile, with attributes, psychic potential and skills — The camp: every exile has a dossier, a past and a reason they left

People, not units

Recruits arrive with a past. An agronomist, 20, exiled for chasing thrills. A 77-year-old architect. A paleontologist, 63. Each has skills, a psychic potential in all four disciplines and a dossier you can read and edit. Friendships, rivalries and the occasional romance form around the campfire, and a squad of friends fights with more Will than a squad of strangers. You'll never have enough crowns. Somebody always goes out with a sling.

The campaign map of prehistoric Europe with regions held by the exiles and two rival powers — Europe before us: 50 regions built from real elevation data

A campaign across a lost Europe

The map covers 50 regions from Britain to Anatolia, cut from real elevation data of the basin as it dried. The crystalline Glass Court and the many-voiced Brine Choir fight each other as hard as they fight you. Hidden refuges send you new exiles every few weeks, and taking a capital means winning three missions in a row: outer works, walls, citadel. It's ironman. The dead stay dead.

In development

Messalith is in development for PC, with no release date or store page yet. Every image on this page is a work-in-progress capture from the game itself.

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